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The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson

Start date: April 1, 2012

Finish date: May 31, 2012

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Jan 28, 2014 Antonia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2014

Very dark and very meta. It’s brilliantly conceived and written. It certainly deserved the Pulitzer. That said, it wasn’t easy to read. More than once, I considered putting the book aside. I’m glad now that I didn’t do that. There’s so much to think about. Identity, first and foremost. Whether and how and to what extent a person can change his identity. Authenticity. Love and loyalty. Heroes, villains. The nature of narrative, fiction, lies. The uses of the imagination. The darkness, the hidden, Very dark and very meta. It’s brilliantly conceived and written. It certainly deserved the Pulitzer. That said, it wasn’t easy to read. More than once, I considered putting the book aside. I’m glad now that I didn’t do that. There’s so much to think about. Identity, first and foremost. Whether and how and to what extent a person can change his identity. Authenticity. Love and loyalty. Heroes, villains. The nature of narrative, fiction, lies. The uses of the imagination. The darkness, the hidden, the underground (tunnels, mines, underwater).

The story unfolds by way of a dreamlike, surreal, hallucinatory narrative. There are different stories being told (by an omniscient narrator, by an interrogator/biographer, by the state propaganda machine). All the time that the story is being revealed to the reader, another version of it, winner of the “The Best North Korean Story,” is being broadcast through state loudspeakers directly into the characters’ homes and workplaces. All of these stories weave back and forth in time, they wind around one another, they merge and separate. This creates so much confusion that it’s impossible to keep straight what’s real and what’s not.

I found myself always wondering whether what I was reading actually happened (I mean in the story) or whether I was in Jun Do’s imagination (his way of dealing with pain). Does it even matter which is which? Of course, on one level, none of it’s real. On another, all of it is. (I recognize that the entire novel is a work of the imagination — just to be clear — and that the settings/events may not accurately depict real North Korea.)

I assume that different readers will draw different conclusions about the “facts” of the story. And I’m sure that’s intended. And what is more powerful? Facts or fiction? Which is more important? I note, too, that some reviewers have seemed to take the whole story as factual (I mean the facts of the story, not as real life documentary) and then pronounce it implausible. As Jun Do says to himself, “The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.” He also says: “Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.” This seems to me a key as to how to read the book.

As one reviewer (Ian Buruma) has said: “You have to live within the lie to survive, whether or not you believe in it. The problem for the characters in Johnson’s novel, as is no doubt true in real life, is how to retain, or acquire, the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood in such circumstances; how, as one of Johnson’s characters puts it, ‘to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward.’”

Whew! ...more

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Dec 14, 2011 Gayla Bassham rated it it was amazing

Shelves: src-spring-2012, 2012-reads, 2013-reads

Update: I just finished my re-read of this book, and I enjoyed it as much this time as I did a year ago. I think what Johnson does so well here is evoke a real sense of place. His North Korea feels like a real, lived-in place. Is the plot far-fetched? In some (many) places, yes. But the very far-fetched-ness (we're going to pretend that's a word) of the plot is one of the elements that helps transport the reader to another place. The North Korea in this book is a place where the usual rules of l ...more

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